The major challenge faced today in the field of web accessibility assessment is that a major portion of assessment is being done manually which increases effort and cost, due to the limitations in current state of automation. It has been observed that traditional methods used for automating the web accessibility assessment, either utilize Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) with or without Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), JavaScript semantics or HTML Document Object Model (DOM) for identifying web elements present on a web-page. Since the traditional methods identifies each web element based on structure and semantic of HTML code, associated to each web element, the traditional methods are only capable of identifying the web elements such as an image, a table, a heading, a list, hereinafter referred to as basic web elements, with ease and thereby perform the automated web accessibility assessment on the basic web elements.
In addition to the basic web elements, there are some other web elements, hereinafter referred to as complex web elements, present on the web-page which cannot be identified based on the structure and the semantics of the HTML code. Examples of the complex web elements may include, but not limited to, a menubar, a treeview, and a “Completely Automated Public Turing Test to tell Computers and Humans Apart” (CAPTCHA™). It is to be understood that the complex web elements cannot directly inference from the HTML or the HTML DOM because the complex web elements do not have a defined structure or semantic of the HTML code. Hence, the complex web elements are interpreted as the basic web elements and are assessed in the same manner as the basic web elements are assessed by the traditional methods.
The accessibility requirements of the complex web elements are different and more complicated than that of the basic web elements. Therefore, due to complexity in identification of the complex web elements, manual effort is required to identify each web element before assessing the web accessibility and hence increases the effort and the cost of the web accessibility assessment.